> I assume you refer to the anarchist colony believing to be free while depending on selling minerals to the mother country - which sees it as a mining colony. It's tricky whether to frame it as trade or taxes. What would happen if they stopped selling minerals to the mother country? Probably an invasion?

Given that the colony is free, in that the other countries don't in any way interact with (or even have awareness of) their affairs, I don't see what the issue is with that presentation. The colony is engaging in an agreement with another entity to sell goods to a different one - isn't that what such a polity does? Le Guin is clear that the politics of the homeworld, until the events of the novel, have no bearing on the politics of the colony.

> Do you think the government could have come up with Google or Tesla?

Yes. The US government is arguably responsible for the existence of the Internet via DARPA. It put a man on the moon. It developed the most powerful weapon in human history, in secret. Naturally, this is as part of a complex system of interrelated government, academic, corporate, and even non-profit groups - but these were government programs first and foremost. Why couldn't it have? Further, how much of Google and Tesla's technology is based on government-funded research?

> I think the discriminating feature of a government is not large scale synchronisation but holding the monopoly on violence (and threats: if you don't pay a percentage of your profits, you'll be thrown in jail).

I am open to considering "near-monopoly on societally acceptable violence" as a secondary purpose for government, but I still think - and this can be seen as far back as the early United States' founding documents, and well before - that "organizing large groups of people for a variety of purposes" is a more defining charactaristic.

> In an anarcho-capitalist society you're likely going to end up with different companies providing protection and health care - and insurances on top. Not having a single defining law but multiple contracts (that can be arbitrated in private courts) could give people the flexibility to live closer to their ideal rules. You don't like your health care? Look for another provider.

What if there isn't one? What if you can't afford any of the good ones? What if the one you have locked you into a lifetime contract and you can't leave? What if your employer is the only power in your area and won't change its mind about what kind of healthcare they allow you to get?

> The choice is in the hands of the consumers.

Is healthcare a basic right, or a commodity? Is anything a basic right? If not, why not?

> I don't understand what Europe is trying to be, if not another USA.

If that is what it wants to be, I don't see a problem with it - and, to be clear, if Britain really wanted out from that, it is their right. Nowhere am I suggesting that they didn't have the right to leave. I just wish they hadn't, and think it is bad for them.

> The USA went from being a minarchist federation to the largest employer in the world, charging taxes as high as Europe to all its citizens. If that's not moving toward socialism, I don't know what it is.

It definitely is. In fact, one of the frustrating things about American society today is that we're so afraid of using the word "socialist" to describe what we are (because it is Evil Bad Term because USSR and Venezuela) that we have no good simple word to describe the fact that we are a socialist mixed-economy Western-style republic, just a somewhat less socialist one than most of the others.

I just don't see that as a bad thing - in fact, I would like us to be more like the others, not less. The problems in American society, in my view, are much more systematic and intractable than they are in many other places in part because we're not willing to give more people more of what they need. (Though, to be honest, I think we could both get what we want if the US turned into a federation of less-closely-aligned states with different policies and laws for people who wanted different ways of living and being governed. That just feels like a fantasy/not realistically achievable.)

> Still, if that's the price to pay to avoid greater redistributive European policies (like the 750bln€ for Covid affected countries), I think that's the lesser evil.

I completely disagree, and indeed, I don't see redistributive policies as an evil of any kind.

But honestly, you don't have to answer all these questions or respond to all these points, if you don't want to take the time. I'm stating them to explore the corners of all the ways I feel your preferred systems of society are insufficient in the context my worldview. I suspect that there may be enough daylight between our fundamental perceptions of what people are, what they are allowed to do, and what they are obligated to provide to each other that we will not agree on many core principals, and a discussion of those is certainly outside the scope of this thread on Brexit - not that I am not happy to have it.